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Zen Garden 01

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart.
Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.

Carl Jung, 1865 - 1961

Zen Garden 01, 36H x 48W x 2D inches mixed media: acrylics, geranium leaf, modeling paste, texture medium on canvas wrapped sides textured. Main canvas inset, 4" wide box-frame, gold and red crackle outer frame

The first Zen Garden, one in a 4-piece set commissioned in 2000, inspired the ongoing series. After the first few pieces in the Zen Garden series, when they were fairly large, and commercial texture mediums so expensive even in large quantities, I began experimenting with other materials to reduce the costs.

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Portfolios: August 2013 Curator Reviewed Art, Zen Garden Series

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Comment by Nikki Coulombe on August 20, 2013 at 1:51pm: Zen Garden 01 spawned the ongoing series, with each prompting calming, yet re-energizing, meditative effects while creating. The possibilities are endless. Thanks for the feedback about this piece.

Comment by Resident Curator on August 17, 2013 at 10:14am: Curator’s Comment:

Your Zen Garden series is especially lovely. I enjoy the meditative patterning we seek and discover in actual Zen gardens, along with the heightened, mindful awareness through texture and color. The sweeping circular concentric lines evoke raked sand, but additionally the rings of an old tree trunk or human fingerprint. So there’s a suggestion of person identity; the unique and personal discovered in the mundane and pervasive. The triadic grouping of small stones offer well positioned focal points to help mitigate the compositional flow of space. But I also see a curious and almost analytical fracturing of space- you mention the images of canvas set into one another in the caption. While their visual separation and the seams are barely noticeable divides, the apportioning does act to shift the encounter to a more intimate and partitioned space. I also enjoy that this piece is technically realistic, but through its minimal composition and delicate manipulations of color it becomes an abstraction.